No location of MH370 despite over 1000 days searching: final report

Australia’s transport safety investigator has a «better understanding than ever» of where downed flight MH370 is and says it is «unacceptable» the plane has not been found, more than three years after it crashed.

The Boeing 777, with 239 people on board, disappeared on March 8 2014 on a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing and is thought to have flown off-course and crashed in the southern Indian Ocean off the coast of Western Australia.

Search for MH370 ends

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Search for MH370 ends

The mission to find the main wreckage of the missing Malaysia Airlines plane has officially been called off. Vision: Seven News

In a final report on the aviation tragedy, released on Tuesday, the Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB) said the search for the plane had been the largest of its type in aviation history.

The air and underwater search, co-ordinated by Australia and involving the governments of Malaysia and China, was suspended in January and will only resume if the «specific location» of the aircraft is found.

The ATSB said the $200 million search eliminated «most of the high-probability areas» where the plane could be, which were derived from its flight path.

«The understanding of where MH370 may be located is better now than it has ever been,» the report said.

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«Debris drift studies conducted in the past 12 months have identified the most likely area with increasing precision.

Flight officer Rayan Gharazeddine on board a Royal Australian Air Force Orion searches for the missing Malaysia Airlines flight in 2014. Photo: AP

«Re-analysis of satellite imagery taken on 23 March 2014 in an area close to the 7th arc has identified a range of objects which may be MH370 debris.

«This analysis complements the findings of the First Principles Review and identifies an area of less than 25,000 square kilometres which has the highest likelihood of containing MH370.»

The search for MH370 was the largest of its type in aviation history, covering several million square kilometres of the ocean’s surface and below. Photo: AP

The ATSB acknowledged the «extraordinary» efforts of searchers from around the world, but said the aircraft needs to be found before it can be established why it went down.

«It is almost inconceivable and certainly societally unacceptable in the modern aviation era with 10 million passengers boarding commercial aircraft every day, for a large commercial aircraft to be missing and for the world not to know with certainty what became of the aircraft and those on board,» the report said.

«The ATSB expresses our deepest sympathies to the families of the passengers and crew on board MH370.

«We share your profound and prolonged grief, and deeply regret that we have not been able to locate the aircraft, nor those 239 souls on board that remain missing.»

Six Australians were on the doomed flight, including Queensland couples Rod and Mary Burrows and Robert and Catherine Lawton, who had been on a holiday.

Also on board was Paul Weeks, a New Zealand-born mining contractor who lived in Perth with his wife and two children

The search by numbers

1046 days spent searching

710,000sq/km of Indian Ocean seafloor mapped, the largest ever single hydrographic survey

120,000sq/km of high-resolution sonar, also the largest ever search or survey of its kind

661 areas of interest identified in sonar imagery of the seafloor, 82 of which were investigated and eliminated as being related to MH370